Motech Photo Shoot

Sorry it's been a little quiet recently - shot quite a few weddings and may blog about those soon, but I thought you might be interested in a car photoshoot from the weekend for Motech. (http://www.motechperformance.co.uk/)

[Thanks to Mike of Motech and James / Dave for the 'loan' of their cars for the shoot.]

(You can see the full gallery of the shots here: http://www.philhackettphotography.com/motech)

Photographing cars is a challenging business - it's difficult to avoid getting hotspots from the lights; reflections can also ruin the shots.

I decided to use a 5x7 Lastolite HiLite with two Lencarta ElitePro 2's inside. I love the ElitePro 2's as I can control the power remotely - this proved invaluable when tweaking the output in the car shoot.

This was the basic setup:

The black background gave a plain backdrop and removed unwanted reflections from behind the cars.
I angled the soft 'wall' to give some variation in illumination from left to right, although I ended up increasing the power of the flashgun furthest from the car to make the drop-off less severe.

This shows the general effect:

In the first shot above you can see an octobox - I experimented with this as a fill light for some shots, but had it switched off for most.

You can see the reflection of the softbox here - note the more even lighting across the car:

For straight engine shots I used a softbox on its own:

When I wanted the front and engine I used the soft 'wall' to light the front of the car and a 70cm beauty dish to pool some light onto the engine bay:

We used a couple of ramps to angle the rear of the car for details of the exhaust system:

Camera / lens combinations - I mostly used a 1DsIII with the 70-200 f/2.8 II. For the engine shots I used a 50mm and I did take a couple of wider angle shots of the front of the M4 using my 16-35 & 24-105 zooms.